Google, an Alphabet subsidiary, operates the world’s most widely used web search engine.
Google began as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. The pair incorporated Google in 1998, building a search service whose ranking system emphasized relationships between web pages. The company later expanded into advertising, online video, mobile software, cloud computing, hardware, and artificial intelligence.
In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., a newly created holding company. Alphabet separated Google’s core internet businesses from several other ventures, including autonomous-driving and life-science projects. Google Search remains the company’s best-known service and a major source of advertising revenue.
Google is sometimes confused with Alphabet because Alphabet is the publicly traded parent corporation. Google is the operating subsidiary and brand most users encounter. Alphabet’s market capitalization reflects investors’ valuation of the entire corporate group, not only the search engine.